13655

Reparative Aesthetics: The Arts of Care and Repair

N.N.

Comments

Art has always been credited with the power to redeem the human soul. Whatever one wishes to make of this claim, in recent years attention has focused on the capacity of art to repair and redress a broken world. Work made by Native American, Australian Aboriginal, and South American Indigenous artists has addressed the traumas of racism, slavery, and coloniality, but this turn toward “care”, “repair” and “redress” can be conceived as part of a wider “reparative aesthetics” in which European contemporary artists participate too. This seminar investigates the development of the notion of “reparative aesthetics” and its use by artists across the world. close

Suggested reading

Ahmed, S., 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Attia, K., 2018. Open Your Eyes: ‘La Réparation’ in Africa and in the Occident. Third Text, 32(1), pp.16-31. Bennett, Jill. 2005. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Best, S. 2016. Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography. London: Bloomsbury Press. Butler, J., 2004. Precarious life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Guerin, F. and Hallas, R. eds., 2007. The Image and the Witness: Trauma, memory and visual culture. London: Wallflower Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Kisin, E., 2024. Aesthetics of Repair: Indigenous Art and the Form of Reconciliation. University of Toronto Press. Pieprzak, K., 2024. Poetics of Repair: Contemporary Arts and Afterlives of Colonial-era Mass Housing in the Maghreb. Duke University Press. Reeves-Evison, T. and Rainey, M.J., 2018. Ethico-aesthetic repairs: Introduction. Third Text, 32(1), pp.1-15. Saltzman, L., 2006. Making Memory Matter: Strategies of remembrance in contemporary art. University of Chicago Press. Sontag, S. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin. close